Vulcans Don't Meow in public
by Penbrydd
Summary: Transporter fail! Spock has been turned into a cat!


**Characters:** Spock, Kirk, Scotty, Chekov, Uhura, Sulu, Bones  
**Rating:** PG  
**Warnings:** Typical catlike behaviour. Hairballs.  
**Notes:** **TehOpheliac** won this from me in the **help_haiti** fandom auction (on LJ), and I have just now finally finished the bloody thing. She requested Spock as a cat. I still suck at crackfic. Apologies.

* * *

This was, in his own words, utterly intolerable. Unfortunately, those words exited Spock's mouth as an irate yowl, accompanied by a tail twitch. The very instant he was himself, again, he would demand that the ship be taken to the nearest starbase and the entire transporter array replaced. Twice in a month, members of the senior crew had been incorrectly reassembled as animals, and while Kirk, as a pigeon, had been infuriating for even Spock's Vulcan tolerances, himself as a large black cat was simply impractical and embarrassing. He licked one paw and stared hard at the chief engineer, pleased to note that it was still possible to raise an eyebrow, in this condition.

Twitching one ear, he stalked out of the transporter bay and attempted to head for the bridge. Unfortunately, the turbolift did not speak Terran feline. Nor did it speak Vulcan feline, he realised after a long moment of trying. With a low growl, he let himself out of the lift and went to find a convenient Jeffries tube. This was no way to treat an officer.

After a great deal of climbing through the innards of the ship, Spock emerged on the bridge, slightly dusty and thoroughly displeased. He batted at the dust with his paws, but no amount of swatting would remove it. Finally, he gave in and licked himself clean, before stepping around the front of the console he'd entered behind.

Pausing behind Uhura's chair, Spock was momentarily fascinated by the ends of her hair. He reached up with one paw and batted at the tips, before bounding up to attack the strands. There was no logic to it, but the long, thin strands were irresistible to something deep-set in his new brain. Within seconds, he was hopelessly entangled, and Uhura was extraordinarily irate.

"Whose damn cat is this?" she demanded, untwisting his claws from the newly-made knots in her hair.

"Ship's cat," Kirk offered, apologetically. "Actually, that's Spock. Scotty's having trouble with the transporters again."

"Meow," Spock insisted, in Uhura's direction, before hopping onto the arm of the captain's command chair.

"Spock? ... Really?" Uhura's expression hovered between hilarity and dismay. "Sorry, sir."

"Aww, kitty!" Kirk said, with a smile, as he reached out to pet the enormous cat.

Spock's ears flattened, and his tail twitched dangerously. One eyebrow arced up.

Kirk coughed. "Sorry, Commander. You're just ... fuzzy."

With a low sound of displeasure, Spock laid down on the arm of the chair and watched the main viewer, with half-closed eyes. After about fifteen minutes of watching space go by, he dozed off, with a faint snuffling sound.

* * *

After an indeterminate period of time, Spock woke to a Russian accented voice. "Here, kitty! Look here!"

He yawned and raised an eyebrow at Chekov. "Mrowr," he complained, kneading the arm of the chair and preparing to go back to sleep. Maybe Scotty would have fixed the transporter, by the time he actually got up.

Then he saw the bright red spot slowly creeping up his paw. For a moment, the cat instincts took over, and he swatted it, with the other paw, only to watch it reappear, on top of his paws, again. This wasn't right, the Vulcan part of his brain insisted. It was some kind of trick. Tipping his head back, he squinted at the red dot and noticed the faint red trace that extended from it, back to Chekov's hand.

"Mrrr." One eyebrow lifted and both his ears cocked back, as Spock let the kitty instincts take control. The cat clearly knew what to do with this situation.

Sadly, no one else on the bridge was expecting it, and Chekov needed two stitches in his hand.

"If you'd stop teasing the commander, you wouldn't have this problem, Chekov," Uhura sighed, shaking her head at the Russian boy and the small, fuzzy Vulcan. "And stop acting like a Klingon, Spock. It's not becoming."

Spock stopped licking his paw to glare at Uhura, before slinking off the bridge to harass Scotty.

Scotty had to finish remodulating the transporter, soon. Spock was tired of being a cat, and more tired of watching people fill in for him, poorly. Never insist that a human do a Vulcan's job, he thought, stalking into the transporter room, with a demanding yowl. He sat in the centre of the floor, pointedly watching the chief engineer, his tail twitching, irritatedly. When Scotty declined to address him, after three minutes, Spock stiffly walked over to rub against the engineer's legs.

"Och, hello, Commander. I'm working as fast as I can, here." Scotty staggered back from the console as the huge black cat leaned heavily against his shins, purring.

Spock proceeded to rub his head against the toe of Scotty's boot, gazing balefully upward, when the engineer again attempted to approach the console. "Mrow-ow!" he insisted, rolling over, to bat at a dangling wire, beneath the console.

"We canna have yeh doin' that, sir. Why don't you go back to the bridge, and help the captain?" Scotty suggested, crouching down and gently pushing Spock away from the open panel.

Spock butted his forehead into Scotty's, before realising that not having thumbs probably meant that a mind meld wouldn't work. "Mrr," he protested, pawing at Scotty's face. The wire was definitely part of the problem, and from his lower perspective it was easy to see. Unfortunately, he couldn't convey that, without bringing Scotty down to his level.

With a blood-curdling yowl, he leapt into Scotty's shoulder, knocking the engineer over, and pulled the wire further out of the panel, on the rebound. Before he could see if Scotty had recognised the problem, security escorted him out, carrying him back to the bridge, amid myriad vehement protests.

* * *

For some time, he had been draped across the back of the command chair, like the kitty god of the captain's world, when Spock realised he needed to stop being a cat, soon, before the experience completely ruined his Vulcan sensibilities. There were no circumstances under which he would normally consider himself godlike, but there appeared to be a feline reaction to heights that caused such thoughts. With the awareness of it, perhaps he would be able to control it.

Of course, he wasn't certain he really wanted to control it. It was rather pleasant to be the lazily angry cat-god of the bridge.

As he continued to consider the situation, licking his paws and washing his face with them, he started to feel a strange, crawling sensation in his stomach -- nothing he'd ever felt, before. He looked suspiciously around the bridge, glaring at everything that moved, as the sensation grew more and more insistent. Finally, with a strangely squishy hacking sound, he deposited a hairball in the captain's lap.

With a small disgusted growl, he licked the captain's collar to get the taste out of his mouth, and laid back down to sleep, while Kirk leapt up demanding paper towels and insisting that someone take the commander to sickbay, at once.

"You're just nothing but trouble, today, Spock! First you tear up Chekov, then you _throw up_ on Jim?" McCoy rolled his eyes at the cat lounging arrogantly on one of his biobeds.

Spock blinked lazily at the doctor, then returned to picking at the edge of a pillowcase, with one claw. He wasn't certain why, but he needed to pull out the entirety of this one thread -- just this one, assuming it didn't break. Of course, if it did, he'd have to try again.

While Spock was distracted by the pillow, McCoy tagged him with a hypospray and then another. "Those should keep you from objecting violently to anything else you might feel the need to swallow, in this state." The doctor grabbed the pillow and swatted Spock with it. "And stop picking at my pillows. It's a pain in my ass to requisition more of these on a good day."

Looking betrayed, Spock licked at where McCoy had hyposprayed him, and then leapt down from the biobed and walked stiffly out of sickbay. Pain in McCoy's ass to requisition pillows? Well, Spock knew just where to take his revenge for the unexpected hyposprays. It wasn't logical, he knew, but cats, it seemed, were the furthest thing from logic he'd yet been introduced to. It was natural, he supposed, while a cat, to behave in a typically catlike fashion.

With that thought in mind, he entered the doctor's quarters, leapt onto the bed, and relieved himself on the pillow.

Deciding to stay clear of the bulk of the crew, Spock strolled into the botany lab, entirely fed up with the lack of respect crewmembers had for a four-legged fuzzy commander, who couldn't speak any of their languages. As a linguist, he was fantastically irritated at having lost his ability to make words in most of the languages he'd spoken as a Vulcan. He could manage about seven words of Klingon, but they really weren't the useful ones.

But, he'd come here to take a nap. Few people were in the botany lab, at this time of day, and it was a pleasant pseudo-natural environment, well suited to his newly feline temperament. As he wandered between the plants, enjoying the smells of greenery and dirt, he was struck by an irresistible scent. Following it, he found a tall plant with thick, green leaves. _Bolian catmint!_ It was his last thought until Sulu discovered him, an hour and a half later, rolling in the dirt, in the shredded remains of the plant.

"Dammit, Spock!" Sulu grabbed a nearby broom and prodded the commander with it. "That was my Bolian catmint! You filled out the customs paperwork for that! Now you're going to have to do it again, as soon as you can hold a stylus."

Spock yawned and blinked up at Sulu, still dazed from the excess of neuroactive chemicals still circulating in his blood. "Meow?"

Sulu swatted the cat with the broom, chasing him out of the lab. "Bad cat! Stay out of my lab, Spock!"

As Spock bolted down the hall, occasionally defying gravity, to put as much distance between himself and Sulu's lab as possible, he careened directly into Scotty. The chief engineer sat down, hard, an assortment of tools and a stack of PADDs scattering back along the corridor. Spock sat up, dazed and blinking.

"Commander? Just who I was hoping to see!" Scotty leapt to his feet, scooping Spock up, under one arm and heading back to the transporter room. He could come back for the tools. They were much less important than the cat, at this point.

"I need ya to stay right here, Mr. Spock," he said, placing the cat on the transporter pad. "Don't move a millimetre!"

The transporter hummed and whined, the glow around the cat shifting and twisting, while Scotty fiddled with the controls. Finally, in a spray of sparks, Spock appeared, lying on his side on the transporter pad.

"Precisely what has happened, Mr. Scott? I have the most vile taste in my mouth..." Spock trailed off, twisting his head to stare at the ceiling.

"Sir, I think it's best the captain tells you. We're going in to Starbase 38, immediately, for a transporter refit." Scotty hailed the bridge. "Captain, Mr. Spock has recovered. I think he'll be along in a minute or three."

"Three," Spock echoed from the transporter pad, turning his hands in the air, to inspect them in the odd lights of the pad. "Three minutes. I seem to be drugged."

Sulu stormed into the transporter room, wielding a broom. "Where is that goddamned -- erk -- Hello, Commander. I trust you're feeling better? Excellent. I'll go, now."

He tucked the broom behind his back and backed out of the room, before Spock could answer, but the Vulcan just lay on the pad, watching his fingers sparkle in the pretty lights. "Bolian catmint. I think I have ingested Bolian catmint."


End file.
